Iran's embassy in New Zealand hit back at President Donald Trump's threat to bomb the country "back to the stone ages" with an AI-generated image posted on X on April 2 depicting Trump as a caveman cowering before an ancient Persian king.

The Gemini-generated post was a direct response to US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who had posted "Back to the Stone Age" on X following Trump's primetime address. The embassy quote-tweeted Hegseth with the caption: "The Stone Age? That's where you still are."

The image showed Trump crouching in animal skins beside a figure resembling an Achaemenid-era Persian ruler holding the Cyrus Cylinder, widely regarded as the world's first declaration of human rights, dating to 539 BC. A second panel depicted Persian nobles gathered in a grand palace while primitive figure of Trump sat around a campfire.

The post had drawn 19,000 views, 1,100 likes and 171 reposts within five hours.

The embassy's response taps into a vein of Iranian national pride that Trump's remarks have inflamed. Iran's civilisational history stretches back more than 5,000 years, predating the United States by millennia. Former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif made a similar point on X, writing that "Iran had a GREAT civilization during the stone age, where he and his Sec of War belong."

Trump's "stone age" line, delivered during his first primetime address on the war, has become one of the most politically charged moments of the conflict. US Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari called the remark "vile, horrifying, evil," while former Republican ally Marjorie Taylor Greene said the speech contained nothing but "WAR WAR WAR."

Iran's diplomatic missions have increasingly used social media to wage an information war alongside the military campaign, with Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf's "#Israelfirst" taunt and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi's outreach to Gulf states among recent examples.

The latest media responses by the Iranian missions across the globe come as the country continues to up the ante against the US and Israel on social media site X and Telegram with specific channels showing AI-generated videos. In Iran's AI-generated propaganda campaign, built around Lego figurines, meme culture and a running fixation on Donald Trump's ties to the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Iran's state-run Revayat-e Fath institute fired the opening salvo shortly after the February 28 strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, releasing a two-minute Lego-style animation that has since garnered tens of thousands of likes and shares across Meta platforms and X.

Emerson Brooking of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab told NPR that war was increasingly being absorbed into the attention economy. "It's like this commodification of war, becoming part of the attention economy, which is a very strange and discomfiting experience," he said.

The campaign did not emerge in a vacuum. It accelerated after the White House itself released a media mashup early in the war, blending NFL tackle highlights with footage of missile strikes on Iran.

Iran's output has broadly outpaced it in terms of viral reach, with one Reddit post describing the Lego videos as resembling a video game cutscene and praising the visual design even among those opposed to the conten